Hugo Voting – Best Short Story

After Best Fan Writer, we turn to my votes for Best Short Story:

1) No Award
2) ‘A Single Samurai’ by Steven Diamond
3) ‘Totaled’ by Kary English

4) ‘Turncoat’ by Steve Rzasa
5) ‘On A Spiritual Plain’ by Lou Antonelli
6) ‘The Parliament Of Beasts And Birds’ by John C Wright

As always, a line break indicates Double No Award and an asterisk indicates it isn’t even bloody eligible for the award. If you want to read more about my thoughts on the stories, Strange Horizons have just published my review of the shortlist:

This year, however, saw the return of organised slate voting under the banner of Sad Puppies—spearheaded by 2014 Hugo nominee, shit writer, and dumbass Brad Torgensen—and Rabid Puppies, spearheaded by 2014 Hugo nominee, shit writer, and total fucking scumbag Vox Day. In contrast to last year’s limited Sad Puppy success, this year their campaigns swept the board. There is only one non-Puppy story out of fifteen, and that story is only there because the Puppies managed to nominate an ineligible story from 2013 that was subsequently removed.

And why did they decide to wreck the Hugos in this fashion? To redress a balance. To remove all the Politically Correct crap that has clogged up the award for so long and replace it with honest, hardworking, conservative, Christian fiction. As Torgersen so memorably put it: “Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets, Nutty Nuggets.” They have loudly proclaimed that the 2015 Hugo shortlists represent the very best fiction that this wing of fandom has to offer, so it seemed only fair to take them at their word. What unexpected delights would I find amongst this treasure trove of under-acclaimed fiction? If you’ve read anything that any of the Puppies have ever written, I think you can see where this is heading; I intended to read all three short fiction categories but I gave up after Best Story.

That isn’t quite true, I actually managed to read one of the Best Novellettes. At 7,500 to 17,500 words, the stories in this spurious category can be less concerned about economy which is just as well as Edward M Lerner isn’t at all concerned with economy. ‘Championship B’tok’ is structured as a mini-novel with 10 chapters that hop from viewpoint to viewpoint and those annoying infodumps dressed up as documents from the future (the cringe-inducingly named Internetopedia). After a few stretches of his fingers, I’m sure Lerner could type this stuff all day without breaking a sweat. In fact, this is the eighth story in his Interstellar Net space opera series and there are constant reference to previously described events and gaps where knowledge is assumed. So instead of a premise, we have plot – or rather pieces of plot from a megatext. Doughty human spy-spy Carl Rowland must outwit the inscrutably cunning Snakes, intern aliens who don’t know their place, whilst journalist-spy Corinne Elman is investigating a galaxy-spanning conspiracy. Are the two connected!? As the title suggests, it is a load of old arse. The first chapter is entirely unconnected to the following nine, the final chapter doesn’t resolve anything, really the story is only notable for Lerner’s touchingly misplaced faith in the rule of law.

You can see why a story as strenuously undemanding and casually conservative as this appeals to Puppy voters though. Not to mention parochial; as is so often the case, the imagined future is actually a projected mid-20th Century America is which Walter Cronkite (born 1916) is a relevant journalistic benchmark and impressionism (most prominent in the late 1800s) is considered outré. The central game of B’tok, which turns out to not be very important at all, is a recreation of the Battle of Midway. I am too young, too foreign, too interested in literature to be the audience for this work. So I take my hat off to Chance Morrison who is reading them all.